MSDN and TechNet Blog Migration – Wednesday Update

Who would have thought that my little blog post and the blog migration would have been picked up by the press...?

It’s always interesting to hear what others think and we genuinely appreciate any feedback we receive. Good or bad, we won’t grow, change and get better if we live in a vacuum and ignore what others think...

Given that, I understand what Dave Methvin at InformationWeek is writing about. Yes, the cloud is where it's at. No doubt. We are preaching it. We are (mostly) living it. However there are still a lot of legacy systems out there and the MSDN and TechNet blog platform is one of them. The copyright on the software is from 2006. But I've seen the binaries and many of those are from well before that time. Most of this platform is 5-6 years old and the cloud from back then is not the same cloud that we have today...

Dave got one thing wrong though. We aren't in complete read-only mode. The only thing that's not online right now is submitting comments. If you look at the blog roll from the past 3 days you'll see hundreds and hundreds of posts. In fact, I'd venture to say there might be more posts this week than previous weeks. Yes, we asked all our bloggers to get their posts written and into the system before the data migration began. That just makes the migration easier for everyone. But we didn't stop our bloggers writing new posts if they needed to. I'm writing and publishing this post on Wednesday night while the migration is going on. Clearly we aren't that offline.

As to exposing our version- or feature-oriented view of software, this blog platform upgrade will actually result in us moving further away from that view (if it exists in the first place). We just couldn’t iterate on the old source base in any sort of agile or service-oriented way. With the new platform in place we’ll be updating the blog platform monthly with no down-time. Again, we just couldn’t do that with the legacy platform.

Anyway, with that, I’ll get off my soapbox and get back to finishing this platform upgrade...

Speaking of which – everything remains on track. Data is through the pipeline and we are slaving the night away testing. Final web bits go to pre-production tomorrow for final verification and then on to the production roll out!

Have a great morning, afternoon, evening, or night wherever you are!

Sean